


EHHD 



A 



lilliPMIIINH 

012 026 449 7 
J 






E 440 
.5 

.P85 
Copy 1 



^1 .:' 



\ 



iy-/ 



OUR NATIONAL UNION: 



THANKSGIVING DISCOURSE, 



DELIVERED IN THE 



Jf irst Crinitarian CongwgatiBiial (Cl]«rj:| 



NOVEMBER 29, 18GO, 



BY TRUMAN M. POST, D.D 




ST. LOUIS: 

R. P. 8TUDLEY AND 00., PRINTBKS, BINnERS AND LITnOORAPHEES, MAIN AND OLIVB STS. 



L 



Saint Louis, Dec. 1st, 1860. 
REV. DR. POST: 

Dear Sir. — We heard with great satisfaction and pleasure your excellent 
discourse on Thanksgiving Day. Fully sympathizing with the views expressed by you 
in that discourse, and believing that they would be eminently useful in fostering in the 
minds of our fellow citizens, sentiments of patriotism and affection for the Union, we 
would most respectfully request of you a copy for publication. 

FRANCIS WHITTAKER, 
WYLLYS KING, 
J. S. McCUNE, 
RUSSELL SCARRITT, 
SAM'L PLANT. 



Saint Louis, Dec. 10, 1860. 
Messrs. FRANCIS WHITTAIvER, 
WYLLYS KING, 
J. S. McCUNE, 
RUSSELL SCARRITT, 
SAM'L PLANT. 
Dear Sirs. — Your expressed wish or opinion would ever have weight with me. 
If the discourse, of which you ask a copy, shall contribute to strengthen in any mind 
the sentiment of love and devotion to our National Union, under which this people have 
lived so happily, and so long, I shall thank God for it. I am conscious at least it is 
honest in its argument, and conciliatory in its design. As I had it not in manuscript 
at the time of its delivery, I may not have been able exactly to restore it ; but it is, I 
think, substantially the same. 

Very truly yours, 

T. M. POST. 



DISCOURSE. 



II CHRONifLKS, XXX : 12. Also the hand of God was to give them one heart. 

I have selected this text as expressive of the fact tliat National unity 
of counsel and will, is the gift of God ; and fitly to be ranked with themes 
claiming grateful commemoration. It stands in this passage, also histori- 
cally connected with a most memorable and genuine Thanksgiving. Judah 
and Israel, for more than two hundred years, had been disunited, much to 
the opprobrium and disaster, moral and political, of both. Hezekiah had 
at that time sent couriers about to the entire Hebrew nation, inviting them 
once more to unite at least in the great National Festival of the Passover. 
They were variously received in different quarters. But to some of the 
people " God gave one heart to do the King's commandment." The 
consequence was that they kept a most remarkable Thanksgiving; and 
for even twice the usual number of seven days. For, says the Chronicle, 

" The children of Israel that were present at Jerusalem kept the feast of unleavened 
bread seven days with great gladness : and the Lcvites and the Priests praised the Lord 
day by day, singing with loud instruments unto the Lord. 

" And Hezekiah spake comfortably unto all the Levites that taught the good 
knowledge of the Lord : and they did eat throughout the feast seven days, offering 
peace offerings, and making confession to the Lord God of their fathers. 

" And the whole assembly took counsel to keep other seven days ; and they kept 
other seven days with gladness. 

" For Hezekiah, king of Judah, did give to the congregation a thousand bullocks and 
seven thousand sheep ; and the princes gave to the congregation a thousand bullocks 
and ten thousand sheep ; and a great number of Priests sanctified themselves. 

"And all the congregation of Judah, with the Priests and the Levites, and all the 
congregation that came out of Israel, and the strangers that came out of the land of 
Israel, and that dwelt in Judah rejoiced. 

" So there was great joy in Jerusalem : for since the time of Solomon, the Son of 
David king of Israel, there was not the like in Jerusalem. 

" Then the Priests and the Levite» arose and blessed the people : and their voice 
was heard, and their prayer came up to his holy dwelling place, even unto Heaven."* 

*II Chron., 30: 21-27. 



6 

That occasion, too, stands out from a ground of troublous and evil 
times; even as this present. Indeed, the origin of our Thanksgiving 
Festival dates back to the days of famine and sickness and savage terrors, 
amid our fathers. It was well thus. Praise to God is ever due and comely. 
Such time" constitute, moreover, the most effective setting of blessings, 
less appreciated otherwise ; as the diamond gleams brightest enchased by 
jet, or the star shines serenest and purest on a ground of stormy sky. 

It is well, too, for spiritual excellency and happiness, in the darkest 
times to devote seasons expressly to the duty of grateful joy — to look at 
the bright aspects of gloomiest things, and to study gladness. A resolution 
to do this will often resolve the murkincss and sadness of a day of cloud 
and tempest. 

To day I feel that we are called to set our joy on a groundwork of 
sorrows and troubles. We meet amid financial perplexities, and solicitude 
and sorrow for our country — a sorrow that sits at each fireside as a domestic 
grief. Still let us consecrate the day to devout gladness. And we have 
am])le cause. As we call for them, incentives to thanksgiving crowd on 
us like the stars or the sea, from nature, providence and our entire being, 
lint I have thought it most salutary, and demanded by the times, and by 
your own feelings, to select as our theme, for this occasion, Our National 
Union, thus far conserved, through the goodness of God, for almost a 
century. The more so, as the infiuences of political institutions, from 
their very commonness, are wont to become to us as the sunlight and 
atmosphere ; aj)preciated only by their loss or perversion, as arc these, 
when infected by ))estilence, or shaded by disastrous eclipse. Blessings 
grow dear as they die or are in peril. 

Our National Union would be worthy of thanksgiving for what it has 
wrouixht, were it to die to-day ; we woidd still gather around it, as around 
the body of a dead friend, and commemorate its benefits, and thank God 
it has lived so long; may we not, the rather, this day gather around its 
lit'i', with prayers and vows for its coniiiui.ince. And as the feuds of 
briitliiers are oft healed or forgot beside the mortal sickness of a mother, 
may we not hope that our political asperities and antagonisms may now be 
hiishi'd jisvhilc, as W(! watch beside the deadly peril of our Natiomil T^nioii, 
the mothi-r of us all. May not our filial piety be (piiekened, our feeling of 
fratc-rnity be reaniniatccl, and oiir hearts be softened, purified and enlarged 
— as all nmtital recrimination dismissed the while — we recount her benefits 
to us all, in a memorable! and happy past? 

Let UH then to-day, banishing complaint and accusation, reutU'r to our 
God thanksgiving for the fraternal tic that has still bound us together as 
virtually one Nation, f<>r fonr-score years; while the whole earth mean- 
wliilc — East of us in the <>M wiuM, and South of us in tin' new — has been 
rocking with rev(dntion and (.•haiige. 



And tirst we thank Him for the Union of the Revolution ; a Union 
amid Colonies accustomed to act, for a century, as separate peoples ; 
divided more widely, even than our present extremes of territory, by time 
and difficulty of intercommunication, as also by habitudes of thought and 
feeling-, and of social and political life ; and presenting greater difficulties to 
combination of counsels and interests than now. ^Ye thank God that 
spite of all these, He gave them "one heart" to achieve political emanci- 
pation and a place am.ong the Nations ; and in achieving this, to pour out 
as one, their best blood and treasure — all for each and each for all, means 
or extremes alike — standing shoulder to shoulder, true brothers, in that 
terrible hour. 

We thank God again for the Union of the Confederation ; whereby 
they entered as one people into the scale of Nations, and presented a 
league for the most part impregnable to foreign intrigue and influence ; 
and were enabled to live together as brethren, though with governmental 
tie very loose and precarious. Especially we thank Him, that when its 
fatal defects became manifest in the paralysis and impoverishment of the 
Federal Government, amid the conflicting claims, legislations, judicatures 
and commercial regulations of States, He enabled them to go through the 
fearful experiment of the dissolution of one government and the creation 
of another, without bloodshed or tumult, in the quiet of a profound peace ; 
presenting a spectacle without a parallel in history, and of which any 
people were presumptuous to invite a repetition. And we thank Him 
that He gave them finally one heart to form the Union of the Consti- 
tution : expressly projected and ordained by them, " To form a more 
perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for 
the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings 
of liberty to themselves and their posterity." * 

It was God, we believe, that gave them one heart to overcome the 
almost insuperable difficulties of conflicting opinion and seemingly con- 
flicting interest in the way, and to frame an instrument on the whole, the 
most perfect of its order ever devised by man. All human things are 
imperfect. But its seeming diverse defects as looked at from difl:erent 
sides, are, most of them, the only practicable resultants of interests, com- 
plex and divisive, framed into one system ; and representative of necessary 
compromises. They were essential to the creation of the instrument, 
which, if not the best ideal, appears to have been the best possible for the 
time. And who shall say it were better there had been none ? that it 
has not, with all its alleged faults, been still an incalculable blessing.^ 
The wonder is not that our fathers did not create a better, but that they 
created one at all. Should we be likely to form one more perfect ? If in 



*See Preamble to the Constitution. 



such hope we destroy this, we shall, I fear, emulate the crime of the 
daughters of Pelias; and see from its mangled fragments, however we 
stir the cauldron, no superior form, no living shape reborn. 

We thank God this day that, for nearly the life of three generations, this 
instrnmcnt has to such an extent accomplished its express designs, of 
"union," "justice," " domestic tranquillity," "defense," "liberty," "gen- 
eral welfare ;" that it has secured a more perfect union, and thereby 
presented us in foreign relations, not as a league of States, but one Nation ; 
wielding in diplomacy and arms the strength of a first class Nation, and 
now speaking with the voice of more than thirty millions of people; and 
tliat thereby we have been safe and respected everywhere, our llag the 
protecting wing of a powerful empire over our citizens on all lands and 
every sea ; that we have stood erect, and not crouched and crawled amid 
tlie Nations; have presented an impregnable front to undue or divisive 
foreign infiuence, whether by intrigue, intimidation or corruption ; that 
we have been saved from the melancholy history and example of all other 
confederacies in the presence of great despotic and centralized Powers — 
Powers which passed from intrigue and bribery to Patrons, Protectors, 
Tyrants and Kavagers. I thank God for the union that has saved us from 
that wretched clientship of States, presented in case of the above Confed- 
eracies; prosecuting emulous suits in foreign courts; dupes and victims of 
foreign cupidity, treacliery and anibition; and purchasing advantages 
over a rival, by dishonorable alliance or subserviency, by mutual betrayals, 
and finally by sacrifice of tiieir own free existence. Would that our 
countrymen might pause to read at this day the history of the Hellenic 
States after the glorious war of Independence with Persia ; the fearfully 
graphic sketch which Thucydides has given of the woes and crimes and 
shaiin-s (if the I'l'lopnnesiaii war; and the story of the unutterably sad 
and opprobrious ages after his picture — the ages of the death and dissolu- 
tion (jf a people, corrupted, coii(|uered, enslaved, crushed undei' successive 
overlaying despotisms of Europe and Asia. 

Let us thank (»o<l for the contrast to theirs, which our history lias thus 
far presenter! ihrcMigh the \inion of lliesc States. And also for that union as 
a means whereby a central government — sovereign in its sphere of interests 
properly national, and arini-d with the fidl complement of powers, diplo- 
matic, legislative, judicial and executive for its self-maint«nance and 
enforcement, and with a nati()nal exchequer, army and navy — is made to 
so harnioiiiz*! with stale sovereignties, in like manner iridepondent and 
^iuprcme in their sphere, that they can no more clash in tlieir proper 
functions, than planets with their satellite moons may c<illide with the 
solar svstem in which they are inorbcd. 

We owe thanks that thus wc have been enabled for four-score years, to 



9 

blend together in our nation the advantages, seemingly incompatible, of 
large and small states, the minutely and thoroughly distributed life and 
culture and democratic activities of one, with the massive strength and 
order, and the larger comparisons and cosmopolitan civilization of the 
other ; a combination, the ideal of which would unite the brilliant, intense 
and thorough vitality of the Hellenic Polities with the stability, regularity 
and power of Imperial Rome, We have thus been enabled to unite muni- 
cipal freedom with strong central government, local variety with national 
uniformity, and individual liberty with imperial order and security. 

We would render thanks, too, this day for a union, whereby we secure a 
uniformity of administration and judicature in interests of national order 
and reach ; and avoid the irritations and perplexities of conflicting local 
ordinances and jurisprudence; and especially, whereby we have the 
arbitrament of Law and not of the sword above states ; that contests 
between States are not driven for settlement to the fields of battle ; a 
blessing we can estimate only in contrast of a state of things where such 
controversies fret through dijtlomatic intrigue, and forceful reprisals to 
war, or form the opening for foreign intrigue, corruption and ambition ; 
as in the case of the States of Ancient Greece or the principalities of 
Medieval Italy and Germany. May we never learn to prize this blessing 
by its loss. 

We have, moreover, reasons for gratitude this day, that we have so long 
enjoyed a union whereby these great interests are secured, not only with- 
out enfeeblement, but with the strenghening, of political liberties ; a system 
not like a Grecian dome, weakened by expansion, but like the Gothic 
minster, where the rising of arch upon arch, with all their tracery and 
interlacing, makes each part the stronger with the strength and massiveness 
of the entire structure. So are individual and local liberties strengthened 
and guaranteed by the interlacings of State and National prerogatives, that 
each part guards the whole and the whole each part. Our State liberties 
are safer for our National sovereignty, and are likely to be crushed beneath 
its ruins if it fall. 

We owe thanks for our National Union, also, in that under it is possible 
a great commercial and economical system, embracing the breadth of a 
continent and zone ; whereby industry, trade, productions, enterprise and 
internal improvements, have been left free to consult for the mutual cor- 
respondencies of climate, soil, position and the geographic configaration 
of a continent, unembarrassed by local tariffs, custom houses, passports 
and sumptuary laws; and unburthened by the expenses, civil and military, 
of numerous petty nationalities, .each with its governmental ofiicials, its 
armies and navies and foreign missions ; a union which convoys the trade 
of remotest seas to- our shores secure under our national colors, and under 



10 

which we have conquered the desert, the wilderness and the mountains, 
and unite tlie commerce of two oceans to a continental transit through one 
people, of one speech, and under one arch of empire ; a union which has 
blent, with a most free and powerful civilization, a domestic tranquillity 
under which has been achieved a degree of physical and social prosperity 
without parallel in the history of mankind. The Arts have flourished, 
enterprise has been quickened, our territories have been improved, 
empires conquered from the wilderness, wealth has been accumulated, and 
commerce quickened and expanded into the most distant regions, and in 
the midst of profound peace. 

Meanwhile not only have material interests prospered ; great social 
problems have been resolved, education has been fostered, intelligence 
has been diffused, prejudices have been corrected, ideas enlarged and 
modified, and a civilization larger, broader, more national, more composite 
and cosmopolitan, been elaborated. Society has achieved a permanent 
advance, and the kingdom of God has been expanding itself and accumu- 
lating power for future conquest. History presents no other such picture 
of liberty, order and liappiness. Shall we, in the wantonness and caprice 
of gambling-venture, put all this to peril ? Amid all this our National 
Union stands as a vast Magistracy of the Peace. Shall we now tear it 
down ? 

Even Despotism has received the gratitude of history as a vast police 
of nations, and nnder that we are sure to seek domestic tranquilliLj^, if 
sacrilegiously we subvert that National Republic which now keeps the 
peace of ouf vast empire of States. 

The Historian of the Decline and Fall, pronounces the era of the Anto- 
nines one of the happiest in the history of the world. True, under the 
dome of a universal despotism the earth was dying all the while. The 
loss of liberty was the loss of life. Humanity was growing more emascu- 
late ; the pulse of civilization beating feebler, and the shadows of the 
coming night falling faster from the Indus to the Atlantic. 

But there was j.hysical well-being, personal safety and unembarassed 
commerce under an enforced universal order. The Imperial Robber per- 
mitt.-d no other than herself. To Syria and Egypt and Macedon, to the 
Iberian and Gaul and the Moor, she said " keep {.eace with each other." 
From her seat in the Cajiitol she looked forth, the supreme court, the 
sovereign arbiter and lawgiver, the enforcer of order, to the world ; the 
centre of a universal magistracy and police, before which the clangor of 
national discords and arms was hushed, and under whose arch of empire 
commerce convoyed her argosies and her caravans and mercantile ventures, 
in unobstructed ways, through peaceful ami prosperous peoples, from the 
Erythrean Gulf to the Isle of BriUiin. 



I 



\ 



11 

So far was Gibbon right that the era of the Antonines shows amid the 
contrasts of anarchy, discord and violence between which it occurs, as an 
Age of Gold. Peace and order are the necessities of nations. Better, 
infinitely, a Russian despotism than the bloody anarchy of the Druses and 
Maronites. We should find the most stringent of military despotisms, a 
refuge from that wretched tumult of petty, jangling, crouching, corrupt, 
Macchiavellian nationalities, which opens on us through the portals of dis- 
union. From a history like that of Mexico or Central America — whom we 
should be likely to follow with even bloodier trace — we should find relief 
even under the despotism of the Czars or Napoleons. That would be the 
certain and the most hopeful solution of the wretched imbroglio. But shall 
we for this, in wantonness and wilfulness, cast away a system which, fur 
three-fourths of a century, has been demonstrated capable of wedding 
together order and life, liberty and law, in a civilization, imperial in its 
territorial range, and cosmopolitan in its elements and ideas ? 

True, objections may be raised from various quarters, diverse and antag- 
onist as the quarters they come from, against the Constitution of our 
Union. Were all invited, as in the case of the ancient picture hung up for 
criticism, to mark their opinions of defect, they would probably leave it 
but one blot. And so, if their marking of excellencies was called for. 
And the defects of one class would probably be excellencies to another. 
I may have my serious objections to the instrument ; you have yours ; and a 
third party has his ; and so on infinitely. But our objections are discrepant 
and contradictory. For the most })art they confute each other. But 
with them all, who does not believe that, with all imputed faults, our Con- 
stitution has yet been, on the whole, one of the greatest blessings ever 
granted by God to any nation ? And when, and how are we likely to get 
a better? This is susceptive of peaceful amendment, if necessary, accord- 
ing to its own provisions. With much reluctance and hesitation indeed, 
should I enter on the work of amending, lest I should take from its excel- 
lence or its reverence. Still, if defects or inequities in it seem no longer 
endurable, can we not confer and arrange in reference to them, frater- 
nally and constitutionally ? But if we destroy to rebuild, from its ruins no 
ree stable organism will be likely to re-arise. The hands that tear it down, 
I verily believe, dig beneath themselves an abyss. Demoniac forms and 
faces the rather will emerge from the seething deeps, that shall wander 
forth to mock and madden through a funeral century ! 

The Constitution, too, we should remember, is blameless for many of the 
abuses accomplished under it, and claiming its sanction. It has had 
strains put upon it, that it should never have been called to bear. The 
misconstructions of hate or of worship ; the distortions of passion, fraud, 
tyranny and fanaticism ; the glosses of parties, creeds and interests ; alleged 



12 

conHiet with natural right or Divine law, or arrogation of pi*erogative 
superior to such right and law ; reverence for its name invoked in defence 
of wrong, until men have been tempted to question the duty of reverence; 
threats of dissolution employed as the leverage for advancing the interests 
of faction, till men l)ave begun to inquire wliat the organic instrument of 
our Union was worth — now, for abuses of this kind the Constitution is not 
answerable ; though by them it has suffered ; and even more from worship 
tlian liate : for the arrogation of perfection, contradicted by a single fault, 
loses too oft our entire confidence. The god dethroned sinks below the 
mortal, and idolatry confuted, turns to contempt. 

But while our Constitution claims not to be worshipped as God's absolute 
work, it does ask to bo revered and loved as the best of its kind, thus far 
achieved or practicable among the nations. Could the spirit of its framers 
still breathe on us from their mould, it would still utter to this Union a 
monition like tliat of the Latin Lyrist to Ancient Rome, " AVhile you bear 
yourself subordinate to the gods, you hold empire." Human constitutions 
are manifestly vital only as subordinate to the eternal constitution of God. 
Transcending that limit they of necessity undermine and subvert them- 
selves. They destroy the moral basis on which alone they must ultimatelv 
rest. The cry of union, therefore, raised to cover wrongs ; to consecrate 
injustice or impiety ; to shield with inviolableness absurdities and abuses ; 
to stifie free questionings of the reason or of the moral and religious senti- 
ment, or to claim our honor and trust for men, in whom, if love of union 
still abides, it grows like the mistletoe, on the decayed trunk of all other 
virtues — such treatment of the Constitution is most illegitimate and most 
unfair to any human ordinance of government ; it must in the end destroy 
it. Nothing can prove more clearly the excellence of our own, than that 
tor so many years it has endured the strain put on it by sucli treatment, 
and yet its liold on the nation's heart has not been broken, but it is still 
strong ill the love and reverence of the millions of this people. But, in 
truth, the utmost of alleged grievances, lying in the course of its past or 
probable abuses, are as nothing conqiared with the infernal gulf it now 
covers and closes. Indeed, we shall best estimate the im])ortance of these 
objections, in the light of the lii^toric landscape that opens upc^n us, if the 
Constitution to which liiey attach, is destroyed. Our debt of gratitude to 
Heaven for the past, can be best estimated by reversing the picture we 
have taken. 

Suppose, then, our country is lc<l along the way in which present 
disunion movements are marshalling us ; our National Banner no longer 
floats in the heaven ; the architects of ruin have liad their way; the North 
American liepublic, with its glorious memories and hopes, disappears 
from history ; a gulf opens before us like that seen of the Ilcbrew Pro- 



13 

})het, on which the four winds strove, and from which issued strange 
tierce, ravening political forms. Chaos is there, and forms as baleful as 
waited around the portals of eternal night. Into that abyss I care not to 
look. Suppose we liave lloundered through it : dissolution in all its 
stages —secession upon secession — disunion on disunion — revolution after 
revolution, have been accomplished. Political disintegration has reached 
its utmost term — what term, who shall tell, when once the process of 
dissolution has begun, and public faith been dissolved. New combinations 
wrestling with new destructions, emergent — who may forecast or describe 
them i How many confederacies, leagues, oligarchies, empires, Eastern 
Western, Northern, Southern and Middle; of the Atlantic, the Pacific, the 
Mississippi, the Lakes, the Gulf or the great Basin? But it emerges — order 
in some fashion — from the dark and crimson gulf. Now what shall be 
the relation of these States to Foreign Powers ? What their place in 
the scale of nations ? 

It is the imagination of Astronomers that once, between the orbits 
Jupiter and Mars, there shone a planet glorious as Jupiter, object of 
admiration and delight to any eye that beheld, and among the lords of 
the system amid which it rolled. A seemingly blank abyss, revealing to 
the telescopic vision alone, asteroids of feeble, dim and servile disc and 
divergent ever-parted orbs — this is the field once filled with its brightness 
but where the fragments of its ruin, nntracefl and untraceable, wander 
now darkling forevermore. 

Such appears our change in the horoscope of dissolution. Our proud 
bj'ight sphere among the nations, knows us no more. Our country speaks 
no more, in foreign diplomacy, with the voice of thirty millions of people. 
It enters in foreign relations no longer with the wealth, the art and pro- 
ductions, the commerce, the arms of so many millions, in its scale. Its 
colors, that spread as the wing of a mighty empire over each ship and 
each citizen on the uttermost land and main, have fallen as a blighted 
constellation from the sky. I see now a medley of petty States, creeping 
and crouching among the nations. Their proud port is gone. On the 
land and sea their flag is vailed, or floats by sufferance. Rival States 
appear instead ; alien, hostile, in shifting combinations of league and 
counter-league, intrigue and adverse intrigue ; the minor clustering 
around the larger, or banding against them — as in the case of Austria and 
Prussia, in the modern Germanic, or of Sparta and Athens, in the ancient 
Grecian system of States — the stronger, whether in strife or conspiracy, 
equally afflicting the weaker, and each and all fomenting within others 
faction and insurrection. A medley of States in such relations to each 
other, I see exposed to insult and injury, at the caprice of great powers at 
home and abroad ; wearying the ear of foreign courts with suits of obse- 
quious rivals, suppliant and accusatory, waiting for patronage or protection 



14 

around the purlieus of palaces ; like client nations attendant on the Roman 
Senate, or the Hellenic cities intriguing at the courts of Persia, Macedon, 
Syria or Egypt. We should become like Mediicval and Modern Italy or 
Germany, the football and prize of foreign policies, and the quarry of 
foreign ambition. Our Union, which, as a wall of adamant, has presented 
itself impervious as well to foreign intrigue and gold as to foreign arms, 
being gone, we should soon find ourselves penetrated, through and through., 
with corrupt or divisive influences from abroad, baleful as Macedonian 
faction or Persian bribery. AVe should enact over again the wretched 
histories of Modern Italy in the presence of the powerful monarchies of 
France and Spain, and of the Othos, Fredericks and Hapsburgs — their 
arena of intrigue and battle, trampled of foreign policies and war. Now 
this is no fancy picture ; it is a prophecy of all past history. Incredulity 
here is infatuation. Are we better or wiser than past times, that like 
causes shall no longer produce like effects ? Our present history, certainly, 
of tumult for disunion, springing from the bosom of unparalleled prosperity 
and profound peace, is encouraging no such conceit of superior reason, 
sobriety or goodness. 

Meantime, with the perishing of our Union, our great continental system 
of commerce and of internal iinprovruients, whether of private or govern- 
mental enterprise, disappear. Amid the distrusts and rivalries, the restric- 
tions, taritl's, passports and conflicting policies, of alien States, and amid the 
tumults of factions, forays and wars, this of course would perish. Our com- 
mercial systems could no longer adjust themselves to the correspondencies 
and configuration of a vast and imperial field, to a continental arrangement 
of rivers and mountains. The strength of thirty millions of people could 
no longer bi; levied to grapple with the desert and mountain. Our Pacific 
railroad would fade out, like Alexander's projected pathway of occidental 
traffic, for ages. Our dream of the trajection of Asiatic trade, through 
peaceful and prosperous millions, of one speech under one empire, from 
ocean to ocean, without passports or customs, must vanish with the phan- 
tom of an imperial past. And not only so, but the land is meanwhile 
devoured by its multiplied exactions. Instead of the civil, military and 
diplomatic budget of one nation, it now has to bear that of nearly two 
score of difft-rent sovereignties, each compelled to keep a large military 
force to guard its frontier and collect its customs. 

Industry, art and enterprise, pressed down undi r these burdens, can no 
loiig'M-, as now, enter into competition with the markets of the world. 
Impoverishment sets in, like consmiiptioii on our peoples, while passport 
and custom-house systems vex the frontier, and the tax-gatherer, together 
with a despotic police and espionage, harasses the interior. Under just 
such influences as these, and springing too from just such a condition as 



15 

disunion now otters us, the richest prosperities hnvc faded away ; whole 
climes have withered, and the curse of ages descended on the fairest earth 
and sky. 

Moreover, with the perishing of our unity of legislation, administration 
and judicature in matters of national order, countless irritations would 
arise, and countless discrepancies and antipathies would be loosed, that 
would fret more and more toward hatred and war. Those prerogatives of 
the central government, which now are the means and guarantee of 
domestic tranquillity, when broken up and distributed among some thirty- 
three sovereignties — soon to be multiplied to we know not how many — 
would be constantly clashing at State bordei's. This political structure 
broken up, all the edges of the fracture will be sharp and dentated. 
Oppositions of policies and interests, and of laws and judicatures, contests 
of claims extending across State lines, and now of national reach and 
relation, will then constantly deepen the contrasts and repugnancies of 
civilization. Alien sentiments will more and more grow up, and more 
and more they will be exasperated to dislike and hate of neighbors as 
foreigners. How long would this continue before the frontier would 
throng with armed men ? Yea, each State, then a nation, must per- 
manently be so thronged, watching and guarding against its neighbor, 
with fortress and standing armies. The frontiers must permanently bristle 
with forts and bayonets, and be vexed with passports, customs, spies, and 
gendarmes. And how long before war would tiash along such frontiers ? 
A spark would ignite it. Occasions would never be wanting. Antipathies 
and resentments, and discrepancies of interest or of civilization, if they will 
not allow our living together as one country, will not, we may be assured, 
leave us peacefully side by side with each other as foreign ones. Especially 
is this hopeless, when we reflect that the original difficulty is not political, 
but intellectual and moral, arising, not from unity of government nor 
removable by political severance, but having its ground in diversities of 
civilization, culture, social order, political economy, and moral convictions; 
convictions amenable only to reason and religion, and not to be arrested 
by State lines or prohibitory laws or armed men, but only by a border of 
desolations over which no social relations should stretch, no press, railroad 
or telefrraph should extend the contagion of thought, and no living breath 
might pass. Indeed, that strife, upon which, as a ground-swell, all other 
strifes of the present crisis arise, and which it is hoped to quell by dis- 
union, would burn all the more fiercely for the proposed remedy ; a 
remedy which, even regarded from the stand point of those who use it, 
seems like stopping the plague, bj[ breaking down the walls of a pest house. 
The evils complained of would be cured by dissolution no more than would 
cholera. They would ^soon, indeed, acquire four-fold exasperation, and 



IG 

without present restraint. How long could this continue without inflam- 
ing into war ? especially as then we would have no longer any Supreme 
Court as common arbiter. 

In this respect, the anticipated position of these States, after dissolution, 
contrasts fearfully with the present. The Federal Judiciary aboHshed, the 
sword alone is umpire. Might alone makes right. Our judicial process is 
war. Our court rooms widen to the field of battle. In each such quarrel, 
too, each i);uty, aiming to strengthen itself by alliance, would draw as 
many neighbors as it could lay hold of, into the conflagration. And on 
every side animosities, grudges, antipathies and counter claims would never 
be wanting, along which would kindle the contagion of war. 

And even if these causes are insufficient, and evil and ambitious insti- 
gators among ourselves shall be quiet, all around will be foreign powers, 
who nuiy think they Hud their interest in our weakness and quarrels, and 
whose intrigue and gold would not be wanting to stir up war ; till, as 
Philip was called in at last as President of the Hellenic Amphictyony, so 
we should inaugurate some Foreign Power as our Supreme Court, our 
Protector, our Master. 

Indeed, abolish this single feature of our Constitution — a Supreme 
Federal Tribunal — and you open the closures of the pit. Violence, tumult, 
rapine, massacre, war — an infernal troupe — will enter this land through a 
breach in this National Union, wandering and wasting, till they devour 
it. And over it, and around it, as a quarry, meanwhile will wait foreign 
intrigues, corruption and ambition, like vultures around a field of carnage. 

Such results from National Disunion are plainly prophesied by history, 
and indeed foreshadowed in the present condition of sentiments and aftairs. 
Earth breeds the same race of men now as of old. If we tread their paths, 
we shall dash on their Kiiin. The past warns us, no strifes are like those 
of brothers ; no wars like civil wars. Community of blood and civilization 
seems only to work the fiercer and more cruel hate. Few wars have been 
so atrocious as those between Judah and Israel, after the peaceful realm of 
Solomon was snndered. 'J'lie I'eloponesian war — a war among States 
related to each other in many respects as we are — breaking out after an 
era of prosperity and glory, raged witli atrocity and cruelty beyond the 
common measure of barbaric war ; and the strife they opened blazed on 
unexliiiguishable from age to age, till it burned up the land. It became 
desolations; and the wilderness and wild beast returned attain. The wolf 
and the banditti hunted together over the lands, before rich with cities of 
opulence and art, a di-iise and ])rosper()iis popidatioii, and with vineyards 
and olive groves. A blight seemed to have fallen on earth and air and on 
man. Art with nature seemed to have perished from the clime of beauty; 
and genius with love and honor, from the human soul. Even at the close 



17 

of the Peloponesian war — which raged on for a generation, extending its 
contagion to three continents and over all the seas, until it burned through 
the whole Greek world — at the close of this war, historians tell us, humanity 
seemed exhausted ; all truth and brotherhood, all enthusiasm, generosity 
and benevolence, had perished : no freshness of life was left to men or 
society ; no youthful look toward the future ; no faith in men or God or 
virtue ; the demoralization was dreadful. But the wound of civil strife 
was not staunched, when the victim seemed exhausted. It was incurable. 
The plague of discord had struck through the entire Hellenic race and 
burned on like a poison in the veins, through two-and-a-half centuries. 
All power of permanent confederacy, or even of peace among the Greek 
States, seemed gone. There was no public spirit, no mutual trust : The 
pulse of Hellenic life, with occasional convulsions rending the victim and 
ultimating in death spasm, ebbed on feebler and colder. In those sad 
ages, men lived on without greatness or honor, without generous aspiration 
and almost without interest and without hope. Civil Disunion, like a 
Nemesis from fraternal blood that could not be Jaid, wandered over the 
land from age to age, till it devoured it and the inhabitants thereof; that 
curse, which, if we now wickedly let it loose on these lands and if history 
follows with us her way-marks in other ages, will rage, unappeasable like 
a doom of God, till it has consumed them. 

The Thirty Years ^Xav amid the confederated States of Germany in the 
seventeenth century, that burned through one entire generation till four- 
fifths of the entire population were devoured by it and the forest and the 
beast of prey returned upon the land again — this may instruct us what to 
dread when discord bears her torch through a system of States like ours. 
Entire realms were ruined and the civilization of the land beat back for a 
century. It has not even recovered fully to this day. 

Italy may also warn us of the effects of Disunion amid small States con- 
stituting naturally one country : Italy brilliant with wealth and culture, 
but for centuries incapable of peace ; cursed with eternal feuds, and meshed 
in endless intrigues and conspiracies, and varying a history of internal 
faction and assassination, with the calling in of foreign arms; the quarry of 
surrounding despotisms, convulsed within and torn from without, till after 
the ravages of Charles the Vlllth, as one of her own sons describes her, she 
resembled the dessicated skin of a victim lacerated and drained by a beast 

of prey. 

For more than a thousand years, the curse of implacable incurable dis- 
union, amid the petty States of her peninsula has paralysed and poisoned 

her. 

Now, she has the sympathies- and prayers of the good throughout the 
world, as she is heroically struggling to heal her long plague of political 
2 



18 

division, and to extricate herself from that imbroglio of petty nationalities, 
that have made her, for opprobrious centuries, powerless abroad, and cor- 
rupt, wretched and enslaved at home; defeating all those gifts of nature 
and genius that made her once lord of the earth. Slowly, toilsomely, 
bloodily, through ages of sin and shame and sorrow, she now emerges 
from that Tartarus. Shall we now plunge our land into it ? Shall we, 
fur alleged present grievances, real or imaginary, cast away that Union 
vainly sought for by otl'cr nations tlirough centuries, with sighs, and tears, 
and blood? Once cast away, we may for ages invoice it, but it will not 
return. 

But what Schiller or Thucyides shall recite the last days of this North 
American Republic ? What Macchiavelli or Tacitus, narrate its process 
of dissolution ? When taxation, and corruption and tyranny and war shall 
unite to slay it ? What hope shall there be for the independence of small 
States in these times of violence ? Must they not be crushed in the coUis- 
sion of larger ones like a small craft between men of war? Yea, what 
hope shall there be for the political liberties of any, large or small ? The 
standing force requisite to be kept up by States so situated in relation to 
eacli other, and in some of them to keep down large servile populations, 
surrounded by foreign States of alien institutions, and to enforce the 
police and ci-nsorship necessary for this purpose, upon thought and speech, 
could hardly consist with the liberties of the small sovereignties that must 
sustain them. 

Un<juestionabIy the exigencies, the very existence of such States in the 
circumstances, will require a strong, consolidated, centralized government. 
The elements may seethe for a while after the act of dissolution. It will 
be difficult for States or men to recombine and to trust each other in any 
new confedtTacy after such violation of the old ; and a chapter of Mexican 
or Central American History may await us. But from the necessities of 
the case, this cannot last. The ruin will at length crystallize, but it will 
be in adamantine and ilungeou forms. Let us not deceive ourselves. The 
loss of liberty — <h-spotism — probably military despotism — according to all 
indications of history and philosophy, certainly lies not far in the distance 
in the path of disunion, to those who shall lead in the movement. The 
pH'-sioii and irritation required to tear down our system, give poor promise 
of ability to build another in its pliic.-. If directed by supposed interest, 
ftuch a course is a drfndfnl mistake; if by resentment, it is suicide. 

It is sad attem|iting to trace the processes of dying States — States that 
die on, after liberty itself is dead ; to watch the progress of internal corrup- 
tion ami external violence — the vulture an<l the worm — that work the disso- 
lution of the corpse of empires. It were sad attempting to forecast through 
what progressive stages, what death spasms, what convulsions and baffled 



19 

struggles foi" recovery, this country may go down to the sides of the pit ; 
as the Grecian States vainly strove through ^Etolian, Spartan, Achaian con- 
federations, to arrest the destiny that dragged them down. Nor is the 
problem soluble to mortal prophecy. Heaven grant that it may never be 
solved by our experience ! But argument from history seems clearly to 
open before disunion, a valley of death-shade, along which waits the inevit- 
able hour — reached through what processes who shall tell ! — when the Muse 
of History, laying her hand on the heart of our Republic, that has once 
beat so proud and strong, with glorious memories and hopes, and finding its 
convulsive throb stilled, shall pronounce it " dead ;" and wretched ages be- 
yond, like those that waited on dead empires past, shall enter to bury her. 
Let us not deceive ourselves, nor think to hide things by euphemism. 
Call disunion whatever else you may, call it not Peace. Whatever it may 
be in theory, and should be in reason, whatever it might be in certain 
contingencies, whatever it may be at first and in earlier stages, to us, in 
our circumstances and relations, in the end its name is War! the war of 
brothers — sectional, civil, social, domestic — and a war of ages. Nor call 
it Order. It is Anarchy rather — dissolution, not of our National Union 
alone, but of sections, states, counties, municipalities, classes, interests, 
institutions, and whatever element of our civilization the solvent poison 
can enter. Nor call it Liberty; for a government strong enough to bind 
up the ruin it opens, must be no other than Despotism; not only political, 
but over speech and thought; whose iron shall not only fetter the body, 
but enter into the soul. Nor call it Life. For the pressure requisite to 
stifle anarchy, and coerce the loosened and maddened elements to order, 
must suffocate and crush life, political and social. Its name is Death. 
And Dissolution — the plague we now invoke — will work on after political 
death, still preying on the body of our civilization, like a worm in the 
grave ; while a Skepticism, sneering at patriotism, honor, heroism, liberty 
and God, shall come forth like a Ghoul from the tomb, to disport itself 
with the ashes of our Great Dead, and empoison the air of the world for 
centuries. 

But I will not look that way. I turn from the terrible i:>icture to which 
I have pointed to enhance our gratitude to our God for our National 
Union, preserved to us, notwithstanding our unworthiness, so long, and to 
stimulate our prayer and effort that it niay still stand between us and the 
abyss into which we have looked. I thank God that the hideous picture 
of it sketched, is yet but picture ; that yet we can stretch our hands across 
State lines and clasp with brethren ; that yet we can look from the 
Gulf to the Lakes, and from ocean to ocean, and say. Oar Country. May 
God give us largeness of heart' this day to cherish, and love, and pray 
for all. 



20 

In behalf of the race of iiiaii, 1 thank God that a Union with wliieh is 
garnered up so much of hope for human liberty, has lasted so long. I say, 
so much, not all. For associated with my thanksgiving for National 
Union this day, is my gratitude to God for the assurance that its ultimate 
triumph is placed above the caprices and passions of this hour; indeed, far 
above any smgle National experiment. Our failure may be the failure of 
the present historic cycle ; may drive society wide of its present course 
through other disastrous despotic ages. But the Goal is ultimately cer- 
tain, forewritten in prophecy and in history. God's Kingdom, that ot 
Truth, Love and Liberty, shall yet live, and shall surely triumph. High 
above the policies or passions of the hour, above the change of empires 
and systems, stands the eternal ordinance, " Lift up your eyes to the 
heavens, and look upon the earth beneath : the heavens shall vanish away 
like smoke, ami the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that 
dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be forever, 
and my righteousness shall not be abolished." * 

* Isaiah 51 : 6. 



I 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



012 026 449 7 f 



